PR Online Contents

Welcome to Partisan Review Online, the portal to every published issue of Partisan Review magazine.

Browse the issues by year to the left, or enter a search term above to search the tables of contents and additional subjects for the magazine. After opening an issue, the internal search may be used to find keywords within the text of the magazine.

We have included PARTISAN REVIEW INDEX 1934-1999 as a resource for users of this website.

We have indexed descriptions of each issue that include the table of contents, as well as names and subjects not otherwise noted in the table of contents. Each issue is also searchable within the application that publishes the magazine to the website. It may be necessary to conduct a general search to locate individual issues, and then a specific search within each issue to locate authors or keywords.

The Partisan Review Index can be searched by using the search bar at the top of the page, or by following the "Browse the PR Index" link above, where the Index can then be browsed by date or by subject content.

The publishers of Partisan Review would, on occasion, insert pages with photographs or images without assigning page numbers to those pages. While these page inserts pose no problem to analog readers, in a digital copy the unnumbered pages throw off the pagination of the entire issue. We have made every attempt to align the digital facsimile with the printed issue but in some cases, with the software available, this was not possible.

The pagination at the top of the browser reflects the page numbers as they would appear in the printed volume, followed by the total number of pages (or page images) in the issue. The box displays the number(s) of the page(s) on display and corresponds with the pagination from Partisan Review; type a number in this box and the software will open the corresponding page. The second number (after the slash) is static and reflects only the number of total pages in that partciular issue, not the page range or last page.

Use of the page number search in conjunction with the general search in the upper right hand corner enables easy navigation of each issue.

Founded in 1934, Partisan Review magazine was one of the most significant cultural literary journals in the U.S. Throughout its 69-year history (with a brief interregnum in November 1936 to November 1937), Partisan Review editors and contributors have viewed critically both liberal and conservative agendas. Apart from an early connection to the Communist Party, it has eschewed party affiliation.

In addition to art and book reviews, Partisan Review contributors wrote on the cultural and political subjects of the day, ranging from psychology and political theories to feature columns from intellectuals who reported on World War II and the Holocaust, the reintegration of Europe, September 11 and the global rise of terrorism, among other topics. For almost seven decades, the magazine published firsthand accounts of American and European arts and culture, and the political scene of various countries.

Partisan Review is valued for its legendary editors, William Phillips, Philip Rahv (two of its founding editors), and Edith Kurzweil. They provided a forum to publish creative essays, commentary, book reviews, and book excerpts by such writers as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. The entire list of editors and writers is a virtual who's-who of the cultural and literary world.

In 1978, Partisan Review moved to Boston University under the editorship of William Phillips and Steven Marcus, and Edith Kurzweil as Executive Editor. Several conferences were held at BU by Partisan Review, as in 1982, when they gathered for the first time a number of writers from Eastern Europe and the then- Soviet Union for the conference, "Writers in Exile," and featured it in a special issue.

Other topics of conferences or special issues in the following years were cultural freedom, education, multiculturalism, and the role of literacy.

The last issue of the magazine, that of Spring 2003, was devoted to "A Tribute to William Phillips."